Forward Deployed Engineer, Handshake AI Enterprise

Handshake was founded on a simple belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career regardless of where they went to school or who they know. Today we power 25 million job seekers 1 million employers and 1600 educational institutions.

In 2025 we started Handshake AI and built the fastest-growing AI data business in history. We work directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations publish benchmarks and push the boundary of data. Weve grown from $0 to $1B run rate and pay $60M to over 30K individuals every month.

Why join Handshake now:

• Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy at global scale with impact your friends family and peers can see and feel

• Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs Fortune 500 partners and the worlds top educational institutions

• Work together with engineers scientists operators and more from Palantir Meta Scale AI and former YC founders

• Build a massive fast-growing business with billions in revenue

About Handshake AI

Human data is the core infrastructure to AI advancement. Frontier AI labs currently improve model capabilities with various data-intensive post-training techniques. We believe that data spend for AI training will increase by 3-5x in the next few years and continue for much longer as models take on new domains. Handshake AI supports all of the frontier AI labs working on

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Handshake AI Enterprise youll embed directly inside enterprise customer environments as part of a small expert team. Youll learn each customers business deeply their workflows their bottlenecks where the real leverage is and translate that understanding into production-grade AI agents that measurably change how they operate.

This isnt an implementation or consulting role. Youll own the full stack: defining the solution building and deploying agents designing evals and iterating until performance actually moves. Over time youll become a genuine domain expert in your customers vertical and use that expertise to build AI that keeps getting better.

Were looking for engineers across a range of experience from those whove already shipped real AI in production to seasoned engineers ready to set the technical bar for the team. If youve built AI that works in the real world and want to do it again at much higher stakes with better data closer lab relationships and a founding team that moves fast this is the role.

• Embed directly with enterprise customers as part of a small deployment team developing deep understanding of their business and workflows

• Define AI-driven solutions based on real business needs not theoretical use cases

• Build and deploy production-grade agents tailored to specific customer use cases owning end-to-end delivery

• Design and run evals to measure agent performance; iterate and hill-climb until results move

• Become a domain expert in your customers vertical and use that expertise to build better AI over time

• Work closely with Product and Platform engineers on your team to ship cohesive reliable solutions

• Establish engineering best practices agent patterns and reusable frameworks that help the forward-deployed team scale output without sacrificing quality

• Surface insights from deployments that inform Handshakes platform and product roadmap

Location: San Francisco CA 5 days / week in-office

• Full-stack engineering experience with strong backend depth

• Real-world experience building and shipping AI applications in production not just fine-tuning or prototyping

• Strong understanding of agent architectures evals and how to measure and systematically improve AI performance

• Comfort working directly with enterprise customers in ambiguous high-stakes environments

• Strong systems thinking you can zoom out to the business problem and zoom in to the technical solution without losing either thread

• High ownership mentality you care about outcomes not just outputs

• Strong communication skills youll be in the room with senior stakeholders regularly and need to earn their trust quickly

• Background at a company with a forward deployment or field engineering model

• Experience building multi-agent systems in production

• Domain expertise in a specific enterprise vertical (recruiting finance ops legal etc.)

• Familiarity with enterprise security requirements VPC deployments or on-prem configurations

• History of building evals infrastructure or AI quality measurement tooling

Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supportedand thrive at work and in life.

The below benefits are for full-time US employees.

Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company

Financial Wellness: 401(k) match competitive compensation financial coaching

Family Support: Paid parental leave fertility benefits parental coaching

Wellbeing: Medical dental and vision mental health support $500 wellness stipend

Growth: $2000 learning stipend ongoing development

Remote & Office: Internet commuting and free lunch/gym in our SF office

Time Off: Flexible PTO 15 holidays 2 flex days

Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses

Explore our mission values and comprehensive US benefits at Experience:

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